Posted
by
samzenpuson Thursday June 03, 2010 @12:14AM
from the stop-searching-for-the-children dept.

Xemu writes "The European Parliament is issuing a written declaration about the need to set up an early warning system to combat sexual child abuse. However, the substance of the declaration is to extend the EU data retention directive to search engines, so that all searches done on for example Google will be monitored. If you are a citizen concerned about the right to privacy and freedom on the Internet, you can help by sending e-mail to the MEPs from your country and explaining the issue to them."

It's mainly a good opportunity to correct some sensationalist misreporting:

A written declaration is just that: a declaration. It's not a legislative proposal and has no legislative value. So the title "EU To Monitor All Internet Searches" is complete bullshit. If it is adopted, at most it can be used to remind MEPs later on that they supported this text, and hence should support legislative proposals in the same vein. However...

... as TFA explains, MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) have been misled into signing it, because the statement that "data retention should be extended to search engine queries" is hidden in the text. "Data retention" is not mentioned, it just says, amongst many other statements, "implement Directive 2006/24/EC and extend it to search engines in order to tackle online child pornography and sex offending rapidly and effectively". There are tons of directives and most MEPs won't have looked up what this specific directive is.

Since MEPs have been mostly misled into signing onto that particular statement, it is quite unlikely to have any clout if cited back at them later on. If someone tricked you into signing a declaration containing stuff you don't support, you'd probably not be very motivated to strongly care about it later on either. In that sense, overblowing the whole thing like in this Slashdot summary is completely counterproductive, because you give the MEPs signature more weight and make them actually more bound to it then they would be otherwise!

Christian Engström's blog post (TFA), where he explains how MEPs are misled, is good because it can help getting rid of the declaration altogether by exposing it for the deceit that it is.

This summary on the other hand is just a bunch of misinformation that will cause a lot of misguided mails to be sent. It might also raise awareness and cause MEPs to withdraw their signatures, but it will probably cause at least as many MEPs to disregard the complaints because it will be clear that people sending a mail don't know what the hell they are talking about.

If document B says, "extends document A with provisions C" and you sign it without reading document A and all A's dependencies, you aren't "misled"; you are lazy, incompetent and negligent. If the process is unnecessarily complex (and this is the EU, so that goes without saying), you simply refuse to consider the document on process grounds. You don't sign something because some words look vaguely appealing to lobbyists^Wvoters and those lobbyists^Wvoters told you to do so.

It's also worth clarifying that they're not legislative documents in the formal sense, but they do form part of the legislative process. To not prepare such preliminary documents with care and attention at every stage inevitably means you'll end up with a bad legislative document.

A written declaration is not preparation any more than a (common) press release or blog post is. It's a rallying document. The preparation for directives happens with white/green papers, consultations amongst the ministers of the member states and externally ordered studies (although the Commission often messes those up, but that's another discussion).

Well, if you mean with "backdoor" that we're getting buttfucked with this, then yeah.

You know I've had this Internet thingy for awhile now and I have notice the buttfucking happens a LOT in the EU. I mean a LOT. Especially in Germany. Man this one picture floating around the net, dear GOD I hope that thing is photoshopped because that dude must have serious problems.

Don't get me wrong. None of this post is complaint, in any way whatsoever.

1. You can generate a custom preference URL (no additional filter, # of search results, etc.) without the use of a cookie and its preference hash is the same regardless of your IP or ISP.2. You can use their proxy.3. Google's site:xyz works.4. You can force SSL for all communication with their site.

It seems that https://www.google.com/ [google.com] is in beta testing phase and works now. I immediately changed my homepage when I found it. This may be old news, but I missed any announcements about it. I know SSL has been implemented in gmail for a while.

On July 14th 2008 Ixquick received the first European Privacy Seal from European Data Protection Supervisor Mr. Peter Hustinx. The Seal officially confirms the privacy promises we make to our users. It makes Ixquick the first and only EU-approved search engine. Both EU Commissioner Viviane Reding and Dr.Thilo Weichert, German Privacy Commissioner complemented Ixquick on its privacy achiev

Without government control of the internet the same search logs would be kept and used against you by the RIAA. Who do you think is "more bad"? Which one do you trust less? Do you honestly think that without government regulation you'd be able to withstand the onslaught of megacorps (or whatever power structure would exit in the absence of said regulations)?

First of all, RIAA is American - we're discussing the EU here. Obviously, there are similar institutions in Europe, so the remark is still relevant.

Who says that we are not going to a situation where both the government and the record industry and all kinds of other organizations will control internet logs of everyone? ISP will log it, and distribute it.They all will find a valid reason to protect the very important interests of something really important (like "Children" or "The Economy" or "Safety").Anyone who will object to this monitoring of the internet is obviously either a Terrorist, a Child Molester or a Communist.(I strongly believe that you can't argue with such points, which is why the discussion should be shifted away from single problems, and should instead be about the internet or even information in general).

On a side note, this is an initiative by some members of the European parliament. They sell it to the public as a urgent thing to stop child abuse. The word privacy isn't mentioned anywhere.

Not really, 'cause without net neutrality - I might just be paying more to my ISP, who would be charged by the search engine for the privilege of having the government track my searches....plus costs of course.

What, you thought keeping the government out of net neutrality would also keep them out of this sort of crap???

Considering actual net neutrality is a full hands-off approach--where ISP's are what they're supposed to be "dumb pipes"(you remember them right?). No, it doesn't. This is simply an example of the government extending it's hand and tightening it's control. The exact opposite of net neutrality. It doesn't matter what flavor, corporate or government. Either one restricting isn't net neutrality.

I know there are those who hype the child porn issue to such an extent that you are labeled a pedo if you post anything less than an extremist attack on child porn, but I'm not so concerned about those people that I need to be anonymous in order to speak out against what I see as retardation incarnate.

I know there are those who hype the child porn issue to such an extent that you are labeled a pedo if you post anything less than an extremist attack on child porn, but I'm not so concerned about those people that I need to be anonymous in order to speak out against what I see as retardation incarnate.

First they come for the criminals and the pedos. Then they come for the rest.

As always, it is a shitty job trying to defend privacy and freedom of expression as one always defends the pervs and the criminals. But the laws are always "aimed" at them, but then magically used against everyone else. Just see the 9/11 laws that were only to be used for combating terrorism.:/

As always, it is a shitty job trying to defend privacy and freedom of expression as one always defends the pervs and the criminals. But the laws are always "aimed" at them, but then magically used against everyone else. Just see the 9/11 laws that were only to be used for combating terrorism.:/

Most of the laws in the PATRIOT ACT that are being (ab)used don't say "... and only to be used in cases of terrorism"

That's the basic flaw with most laws.The legislative intent is one thing, while the actual language of the final law is much broader.Whether this is a bug or a feature depends on your perspective.

Full infiltration of the TOR network is pretty much necessary if they ever want to catch pedophiles in the act.

I've also got some philosophical issues with the removal of access to this content as well. If you take away CP from a pedo, doesn't it just mean that they're going to turn to alternative methods to fulfill their urges, such as nabbing little kids, and public indecency at parks, etc etc??

True, and poisoning the surveillance would be pretty easy through a grass roots effort. Imagine just a few hundred thousand different ips associated with the query "child bestiality porn" entered into the logs each day. The man always seems to underestimate the collective power of disgruntled netizens.

What power? Until now "disgruntled netizens" have had absolutely zero effect: the conversion of the Internet into cable TV status is proceeding at full speed with no opposition. In the end, when all will have been said and done, "disgruntled netizens" will simply wring their hands and accept the new status quo because there will be nothing to be done.

Actually, here in Sweden, coordinated efforts from bloggers focused attention on a surveillance law our politicians tried to sneak through parlament without anyone noticing. In the end, the law was only delayed and slightly modified, but the newspapers started writing a lot more about the issue and people seem more aware of the problem now.

Actually, here in Sweden, coordinated efforts from bloggers focused attention on a surveillance law our politicians tried to sneak through parlament without anyone noticing. In the end, the law was only delayed and slightly modified, but the newspapers started writing a lot more about the issue and people seem more aware of the problem now.

So you're saying that the effect of the coordinated efforts was that instead of the populace being unaware that they are fucked and there's nothing they can do about it, they're now AWARE that they're fucked and there's nothing they can do about it?

Why do you want to kill me? What have I ever done to harm you? Last time I checked, I was spending large amounts of my time and money fighting hard to protect people's privacy and freedom of expression. Now you're calling for my death?

I mean, if you disagree with the church's or pope's interpretation of the bible in public, you're a heretic.

Yes. But I don't think any modern Catholic would argue that you shouldn't be free to choose to be a heretic, if you so wish. It's your immortal soul, not mine. I do of course reserve the right to disagree with you and possibly even to attempt to explain to you where you've gone wrong.;-)

If you're not doing anything wrong, I don't see why you wouldn't want to let the government see what you're doing. In this post-9/11 world, we *have to* to give up some of our personal priveleges, or else the terrorists will win. The sooner we get remove the word "freedom" from the dictionary, the sooner everyone will stop whining.

What's really scary is that there are people out there who actually believe exactly what you said. In their disturbed little minds, if everybody in the world could just have kind, happy thoughts all the time, then we would all get along.

These self-proclaimed pacifists literally become violent if you don't have the right kind of happy thoughts.

Actually, several MEPs have already retracted their signatures. They where asked to sign the declaration under false pretences. They where not told that the declaration included clauses about extending the data retention directive.

Though, if Pen and Tellers stunt where they pulled of a petition to ban di-hydrogen-monoxide, taught us anything is that we should not pay to much attention to petitions in general, and we should be a bit careful about what we sign. For MEPs, that include reading the entire declar

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Bah! In Finland government welcomes any new idea to monitor use with open hands. We have already blacklists which are supposed to keep you away from child porn but it is not working very well and for some curious reason it filters out also local Finnish site criticizing the blacklisting. The law enables only to filter foreign sites.

I think I'm already hearing applauding coming from the seat of the government some 150 km south from here...

Also that site releases a list of kiddy porn sites, which might cause the blacklisting, to right or wrong, there's links to kiddy porn (full blacklist released).

Furthermore, Finnish goverment has quite a track record on refusing all kinds of EU laws & orders etc. Well, at least mostly pertaining to heavy taxation with high refusal to let go of absurdly high taxes.

You know, when the Euro was created, all the members signed a treaty saying that if one of the members were to go bankrupt, the others were not to help. Well, guess what just happened to that treaty when it became convenient? I have no hope for your cited Declaration to be upheld by anyone.

We do it that way in the US too; our constitution is free to be interpreted any way we like when it becomes convenient or popular enough.

The weird thing is that actually the EU did not force this specific treaty violation down the member's throats - the members offered it themselves, willingly. In particular, our dear German band of polit-clowns. With the even more weird result that Greece does not profit in the first place, but rather the French banks, which hold a shitload of Greek debt. Ah, well... we are fucked anyway.

Yeah, my understanding is the bailout was 'secretly' intended for French and German banks........and now that they've gotten their money, I expect now more sympathy or pity or care for the poor Greek citizens.

In the eastern parts of Europe you had to be careful on the phone.
The West smiled when it saw the vast data collection systems and rows of tape.
Now you have to be careful what you type into Bing, Yahoo, Google ect.
Interesting to see the line about "based on the existing system for food safety" [laws].

If I see a crime I'm supposed to report it. But this system can't differentiate between someone looking for child porn, and someone who is trying to use their spare time to locate and report people who deal in child porn.

Basically, we're teaching the public to turn a blind eye. Together with the mandatory filters implemented in even my "free" country the problem is just being buried even deeper.

Pedophiles use children for their own self-serving purposes, and now the government wants in on the "fun". They're using these poor children to achieve the government's broader political goals, getting away with things they otherwise could not. "Think of the children", the oldest trick in the book since the Victorian era.

God help you if you are researcher (private or government) and search for naughty terms. At my local library they tried this a few years ago and some high school girl almost arrested because she was searching for terms like 'child porn' and 'naked kids'. Turns out she was actually writing a report on how easy it was to find illicit porn online. She even made to the local talk show circuit for a while.

This declaration doesn't seem like a law, more like the equivalent to a US Congressional Non-Binding Resolution [wikipedia.org], having no force of law on its own, and hoping the parties being addressed will react to the non-binding request. In other words, it seems to me like hot air to feed special interests.

Here's the actual text:

---

"I am pleased to inform you that, together with my colleague Ms Anna Záborská MEP, I have submittedWritten Declaration No 29 requesting the establishment of a European early warning system forpaedophiles and sex offenders. A normal childhood for our children means a solid future for our, andfor their, European Union. Any act of violence suffered by a woman or a child is an indelible defeat ofthe rules of civilised coexistence. We would therefore be very grateful if, as many other colleagueshave already done, you could support this important Written Declaration No 29 'On setting up aEuropean early warning system (EWS) for paedophiles and sex offenders'. The proposal doesnot involve the establishment of a new European agency but rather greater levels of cooperationbetween the public authorities and civil society in order to defend the weaker members of societyand protect the rights of all.I may be contacted as follows:Tiziano Motti MEPASP 9E209Tel. 45247tiziano.motti@europarl.europa.euDeclaration No 29 may be signed:- Outside the Hemicycle during the part-sessions- At the office of the Members' Activities Unit in Brussels, PHS 2A 019Thank you in advance,Tiziano Motti MEP"

---

They seem to do these a lot, in terms of declaring a condemnation of Israel, or having a declaration on violence against women - hot air to feel good and influence constituents, without any real legal meaning on its own.

To put it in programming terms, it seems to me they're declaring an intention - not instantiating a law. Bad in terms of intentions towards what little privacy remains, but not yet acting to change law.

My interpretation could certainly be wrong - but that seems to be how the wording strikes me.

"We need to monitor your internet searches. You know, to prevent pedophilia."
"But I don't want anyone's internet searches monitored without a warrant to monitor them."
"SO YOU'RE PRO-CHILD MOLESTATION AND YOU WANT GRAPHIC SEXUAL DEPICTIONS OF THEM ON THE INTERNET?!"
"What in the hell? That's not what I said at all!"
"Maybe we should be monitoring YOU, pervert."

> No, because Google can still keep logs of your searches if you use SSL.

That isn't the big problem, it is that your ISP begins to just log everything. They are a lot closer to your local law enforcement and generally wouldn't involve crossing national borders to pry the logs open. If you are in Europe and went to https://www.google.com/ [google.com] they have to start up an international kerfluffle and Google either caves or fights, either action is page one news and bad PR for everyone.

All I see everywhere, is little kids and adults walking hand in hand... Those adults must be fucking those children! Sometimes theres even a woman and a man holding a childs hand as they walk down the street...

Internet searches aren't child molestation. Child molestation is a sex act. So the EU must monitor every sex act to prevent child molestation. Otherwise it's just wasting everyone's time while the real killers run free!

All someone interested in breaking this system at a basic level needs to do is to gain access to some popular server to put some code (plain HTML img tags, or javascript if site is vulnerable) that will automatically do searches based on those "monitored" search terms when a user-agent accesses it. This will incriminate all innocent parties that browse those "infected" pages (as if something like is bad), which naturally flood the monitoring tools with garbage.

I agree, and think you just hit the nail on the head as for what will happen among protesters if this would pass in the EU. Massive linkage from 4chan to Google searches regarding child porn. You don't even need web sites that can provide you a custom text different from the URL, thanks to bit.ly and other URL shorteners. This could and would probably take on as a social network-wide protest on Facebook and Twitter. Thousands of hundreds hits will immediately happen, and if targeting social networks, probab

I almost got kicked out of college because I, from school, googled "6 year old girl in sundress." I was looking for reference images for finishing a photoshop painting of a man walking with his daughter on a beach. I had the beach, I had the man, the ice-cream he was holding and in the middle of class I goggle images of kids because the bone structure of kids is different than adults. 2 days later I'm in the deans office getting a "Letter" added to my records. I'm like WTF? Did they think I was looking at child porn in a room full of twenty three people and the only one who noticed was the IT filter? So it's on my permanent scripts now.

If I go to a 4 year program I have to hope they explained it well enough I'm not just denied for "viewing inappropriate material" on campus. My teacher even backed me up and explained he was in the class with me and that the images where completely harmless, fully clothed, yet they still put it on the record. Pissed me off.

The world has gotten so freaking paranoid about pedos it's crazy. What's next public burnings? This pedo-paranoia has to be screwing up the kids too. When I was a kid we played with all the kids in the area, went where ever we wanted and were pretty damn safe. Now kids have play dates and a small circle of friends. Adults act like kids are made of glass and might break. If we screw up 90% of these kids childhoods with paranoia to save 10% of the kids who are going to get molested how the heck is that good for the human species?

We are going to have whole generations of social cripples afraid to be around each other and eating/drugging themselves to death while they wonder why they can't feel happy. The human race has moved along quite well without fenced in play grounds and cops policing public parks constantly. Kids shouldn't have to live in fear that the boogie man might touch them in their private places. "Keeping the kids safe" is doing more harm than good if you look at it from the big picture. Let them act like kids for Christ's sake.

But I'm sure by posting this I'll be marked as a child stalker. *rolls eyes*

So basically, all the pedophiles (who don't spend thier time doing google searches for 'child porn', I'd hasten a bet) are unaffected, while all the people who search for information on the subject (reporters, worried mothers, hell, anyone looking for information on a subject, which we should be allowed to do in the modern world) gets monitored. Seriously. Great plan.

or the article it's sourced from, so I decided to do a little research on my own to see if this story is true. So I searched google news for the subject matter and what I found was...... oh wait a second, just a minute someone's at the door.

Why don't you monitor all the post and telephones too? I mean, someone could write about CP, or even talk about it... I mean, c'mon! What is this half ass shit. I want everything monitored. I want cameras in my room and on my shitter too!

And I hope you screen the magazines I ordered too, please!

And while we are at it, please make laws so I am not allowed to be in the same bus or train as kids. Ever. Better I have to keep a distance of 500m.

The EU already has data retention mandates for telephone and E-mail. Supposedly, those are not data-mined, but do you really believe that?

I want everything monitored. I want cameras in my room and on my shitter too!

You may already have them if you're subject to police monitoring based on your suspicious phone calls or E-mails. Drug monitoring for your "shitter" is probably coming too as soon as the technology comes down in price.

If it isn't just an Orwellian attempt to record what everyone thinks about everything, one wonders whether the person(s) who sneaked this in really thought through what they intended to _do_ with it.

If it's meant to make police work easier, might it in fact make it more difficult weeding through the false positives?

Do you send the searcher an email, "Dear Citizen, we are concerned for your mental hygiene"? Or a letter to the home to let the wife and kids know? Or perhaps publish a weekly compilation in the local newspaper to give the community a heads up on who is searching beyond the bounds of decorous thought?

Perhaps mandatory pre-emptive counseling is in order?

And, as always, the staffing. Particularly the human staffing for the sexual thought crimes division. Wouldn't do to have the Mayor's wife accused of lesbian incestuous thoughts for searching "telling your daughter about checking her breasts for lumps" now would it?

But, of course, we know it _is_ just an Orwellian attempt to record what everyone thinks about everything.

I've used I2P [wikipedia.org] a little, and it seems like a more mature anonymous network than Freenet, although I've not yet checked out its support for the equivalent of freesites. It also supports things Freenet doesn't, like BitTorrent and IRC. It uses a Tor-like network to relay traffic from node to node.

Freenet and I2P have different design goals. The unique thing about Freenet is its ability to store data in the network itself. You upload something to Freenet, and the data blocks are spread over the (currently) tens of thousands of nodes in encrypted form. This makes it impossible to stop something from being distributed by shutting down the source, but also makes the programmer's task harder.

The problem I have with Freenet, and I'm personally glad it exists, is this: Nobody has actually tested their "plausible deniability" in court, have they? I mean lets say for the sake of argument you are running a Freenet node which has 5Gb of cache, okay? Lets say that 1Gb of that cache is CP, which some cop accesses and is able to track the source down to your node. Now as far as I know the law says you have to possess CP or distribute it, NOT that you yourself have to have access to it. If you handed me a safe that I didn't have the combo for and I get pulled over delivering it and they break it open and find CP I'm pretty sure that MY ass will be going to jail, even though I had NO way in hell of knowing what was in it. How is Freenet ANY different?

I have a feeling if the feds decide to shut down Freenet it really will be easy, as I can't remember ever seeing a statute that says you have to have access to the CP, only that you have to have distributed it. Total bullshit I know, but it wouldn't be the first time that someone has rotted in jail from bullshit charges. So has anybody actually tested Freenet or any other caching anonymous style app in court?

I think the better question is how Freenet is unlike a distributed version of Rapidshare etc. with passworded files. Even though almost certainly file hosts have files with tons of illegal things passing through them, it'd be complete nonsense to prosecute them for it. Likewise on Freenet without the CHK you haven't got any chance of finding out what's in a file. To have any meaningful effect you'd also have to pass a law saying all files must be "open" for inspection for illegal content.

Dude, you ever actually USE a "public defender"? There is a reason why we call those clowns in the south "public pretenders", it is because if you look at the conviction rates with public pretenders you're better off without a lawyer. I know that my local public pretender's office answer to everything is "plead guilty" so excuse me if that doesn't exactly inspire confidence here.

And did you read the links you provided? Threats to take a man's children away, one drug out of bed in the wee hours and drug off